reebmmm writes: The Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care act and it's most contentious provision: the individual mandate. In a split decision, Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority said the individual mandate survives as a tax.

(b) Section 1396c gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority to penalize States that choose not to participate in the Medicaid expansion by taking away their existing Medicaid funding. 42 U. S. C. 1396c. The threatened loss of over 10 percent of a State’s overall budget is economic dragooning that leaves the States with no real option but to acquiesce in the Medicaid expansion. The Government claims that the expansion is properly viewed as only a modification of the existing progra

I'm reading that part right now. The opinion is the Medicaid portion of the opinion says that the loss of funding will be narrowly construed. So it doesn't seem to be a total loss of all funding, just the additional funding. This is one long opinion.

Is it just because slashdot doesn't like to run current news, or is it because it is bad news for the conservative voice of slashdot? It was voted up to red at one point in the firehose, it's already back down to blue (which suggests the latter more so than the former).

The upside is you can now include the relevant links. You could also include the following money quote:

Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had thepower to impose the exaction in 5000A under the taxing power, and that 5000A need not be read to do more thanimpose a tax. That is sufficient to sustain [the individual mandate].

The Affordable Care Act is constitutional in part andunconstitutional in part. The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. That Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, not to order individuals to engage in it. In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congres

The more I think about the Obamacare ruling, the more I like it. I think Roberts was brilliant. Consider what he did.
1. He took the Commerce Clause out of the equation. He said you cannot use the Commerce Clause to compel people to purchase a commodity, and to try to do so is unconstitutional. This undermines many prior decisions, like ones under the Commerce Clause that said a farmer cannot grow a particular crop even for his own use on his own land if that crop in general is a regulated commodity t